It's really fun having your job be to blow people's minds all day every day.
-Sarah Schaack

Sarah Schaack's friends and colleagues say seeing her at work in East Africa is like watching an animal restored to its natural habitat.

“I love everything about it,” the Reed College assistant professor of biology said in a Skype interview from the lobby of a hostel in Uganda. “There's both a gentleness and a fierceness to life here.”

Schaack, 39, has taken any excuse to visit the region since her first trip as an undergraduate in 1995. She’ll travel to conduct fieldwork, to teach, to study Swahili. This time her mission is twofold: to advance research of local importance; and to empower African scientists to become larger contributors in the field of biology.

Sarah Schaack has held workshops for African scientists in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania.Photo courtesy of Sarah Schaack

She is a little more than halfway through a six-month Fulbright fellowship leading bioinformatics workshops and studying a pest she says destroys up to a third of the maize crop—a staple food for East Africans—each year.

Bioinformatics is an interdisciplinary field that Schaack said centers on the “curation and interrogation” of vast amounts of digitized biological data.

African scientists were largely left behind during the molecular biology era, Schaack said. Research there has lagged for the last couple of decades because lab equipment was too expensive. Like other industries, she said, biology goes through phases.

Now a computer and Internet connection are all that’s essential for biological research, she said, thanks to vast databases and free software that allows scientists to analyze DNA anywhere. Schaack is helping African scientists “leapfrog” over the molecular biology era and into bioinformatics research.

“It's really fun having your job be to blow people's minds all day every day,” she said with a laugh.

She teaches scientists who range from undergrads to “high-ranking old dudes.” The lessons range from practical computer skills to hypotheses development. She has led workshops in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania.

Schaack can’t teach the African scientists everything they need to know about bioinformatics in a single workshop, she said. Her goal is to lay the groundwork.

“I’m a door-opener,” she said.

What is DNA sequencing?

Sequencing a genome involves cutting up the DNA and making synthetic copies. Scientists tag the material's building blocks with colors a special camera can read and translated into data. Researchers can then reconstruct the genome on a computer and analyze it. That's where the research begins.

Teaching is the most rewarding part of the Reed assistant professor’s work in East Africa, she said. The research aspect “is just kind of fun.”

But that fun research could have major implications for East Africa. Schaack and her teaching assistants (two of them Reed students) have just finished sequencing the DNA of a caterpillar that plagues the region’s maize and sorghum crops.

Sujaya Rao, a professor of entomology at Oregon State University, said farmers in developing countries often douse crops with pesticides that do more harm to humans than pests, which quickly develop resistance. Schaack’s research could lead to a much more targeted pesticide, she said, such as one that blocks the bug’s ability to recognize the crops.

Finding the genetic basis of the pest’s perception faculties could take years, Schaack said. She hopes the African scientists in her workshop can use bioinformatics to continue studying the caterpillar long after she’s gone.

“I hope it didn't come off like I am here trying to save the world or anything,” Schaack said in a recent email, “because the truth of the matter is that what I am really doing is having a blast.”